The Centurion's Empire (30 page)

"Why did you have it done?"

"I needed the skills to rescue you, Vitellan. I knew that the Luministes were going to abduct you even before
they
knew
it. My imprints were from a particularly potent female terrorist. She sold them for a fortune, I'm told."

"Did my village pay for all this?"

"In a manner of speaking, yes."

The little holographic images winked out and Vitellan sank back into the soft seat of the cab, his arms folded and his
head bowed.

"Last month I was traveling through the Swiss Alps, escorted by a French knight and his men-at-arms. Now I wake up to
be rescued by a female knight and a squad of machines."

Liquid crystal pigments in Lucel's mask displayed the blush on the skin beneath, and she giggled before she could stop
herself.

"Me, a knight! Vitellan, you're a dear man and I'm very flattered. It's the romantic in me, I suppose."
Vitellan sat forward, took her hand in his and kissed it lightly, just as he had kissed the hand of the Countess of
Hussontal only three of his days earlier.

"The courtly kiss, just a light brush of the lips and not a big slobber," she observed, then practiced on Vitellan's hand.
It was the lightest of flirtations and quite asexual, Vitellan thought as she released his hand.

"The original warrior-woman who provided your imprints must have been very impressive."

"Yes indeed."

"How did you get along?"

Lucel's eyes narrowed, although her smile remained. 'Well enough," she volunteered.
Vitellan settled back in the cab's seat again to assimilate what he had been told into the tangle of memories and imprints
that was his mind. Lucel plunged back into the world of infobanks and datafarms through her dataspex.

"Sir Lucel Hunter," she said dreamily. "What a zap. I owe you for that one, Vitellan."
Associations suddenly snapped together in the Roman's mind and he sat bold upright in the seat.

"How—how did you know that the Luministes were going to abduct me even before the senior Luministes knew it?"

"Because it's my business to know," she mumbled distractedly.

"But how, why?" "I can't explain yet."

"Who are you—really?" demanded Vitellan, exasperated.

"For your own safety I can't tell you that yet. Please accept my word on that, Vitellan."
He watched the buildings continue to blur past, but there was little that he could focus upon to study. He began to doze.

"What was it like in the fourteenth century?" Lucel asked as she powered off her dataspex ten minutes later. Beyond
the windows of the cab the Moscow suburbs had given way to farmland beneath deep snow. He shook his head and
stretched.

"I was only there from 1356 to 1358.1 lived in England for eighteen months, then traveled through France to Switzerland
in 1358."

"Thirteen fifty-eight. That's when Bonhomme was frozen. They could tell from the coins and clothing found with him,
and from carbon isotope mass spectrometry— that's a dating technique, in case your imprint doesn't cover it."

"Bonhomme. My imprint says he is a religious cult leader. I knew him in 1358."

"What do you know of him?" "You tell me what
you
know first." Lucel considered, but did not take long to make up her
mind.

"Okay. The airport's getting close, but I'll try. Bonhomme was the third of the ice people to be dug out of the glaciers of
the Alps. The first was found in 1991. He was a Neolithic hunter about five thousand years old, but his body had been
desiccated by the wind before he had been frozen and he did not have the benefit of your Oil of Frosts. Obviously he was
not revivable at all. You were announced, rather than discovered. That was in 2016, when the Village Corporate moved
your body from Switzerland back to Durvas. There was so muchjnterest when the public announcement was made that
your block of ice had to be put on display in the British Museum for a week. Bonhomme was found in the Alps in 2022.
He had also been treated with a type of antifreeze oil, the same as was found in a sample from your frozen flesh."

"Jacque Bonhomme."

"He only calls himself Bonhomme or Goodman."

"He was the leader of the peasants' rising in France in 1358—a bad man, an evil man. He was a renegade priest with
great charisma. He stole my Glacier-Frigidarium for the price of a little girl's life."

"Ah, that fits with Bonhomme. Now he's a major cult leader. He could tell millions, maybe billions to jump and they'd do
it at once. Ah, the airport's coming up."

Snow-shrouded farm buildings had ceased to blur past beyond the windows. Everything was flat, lacking even trees or
fences.

"Where are you taking me?"

"Eventually, to your village, Durvas. It's quite a big place now. The Luministes snatched you from there. I snatched you
from the Luministes. I suppose you were shocked by the trail of bodies I left while doing it, but it's a tough world out
there, Vitellan."

"I can remember seeing men fight each other to the death in public arenas, and for nothing more than sport. Christians
were covered in pitch and burned alive as human torches in

the century that I was born. I have seen the remains of a French nobleman who had been burned at the stake, and I
helped to bury the womenfolk of his family that the mob had ravished while he burned. Later the king of that mob was
crowned with a circlet of red-hot iron by other noblemen. Is your world as tough as that?"

"Sometimes," replied Lucel, but with new respect in her voice. "How many people have you killed—with your own
hands?"

"I have killed two hundred and ninety," replied Vitellan. "I keep a running tally as best I can." "Why?"

"Respect for the dead."

"I've killed seventeen over the last two years," Lucel said calmly, coldly. "The CV agent in my office manager keeps a
tally—encrypted, of course."

"Are you really a professional assassin?"

"I'm a contractor, and a weapon. I maintain myself well."

She rolled up her sleeve and flexed the muscles in her arm. They were impressive, with the texture of pore-polymer on
steel, and were interfaced to a bypass-boosted nervous system. Other tools of her trade were the ability to withstand most
knockout gases and frank darts, and to store oxygen reserves in molecular cages within her body tissues and call on them
at will.

"Addictive, this life," she admitted without prompting. "Like becoming a cat after living as a mouse."

"The Frigidarium is the same. Survive the first jump and you want more. I turn two thousand in twenty-six years."

"Happy birthday."

"If everyone did it, the world would be a different place." "I don't think so. As an amateur historian I think it's the same,
century after century: same shit, different flies." "I first heard that said when Nero was emperor." "Did you meet
him?"

"I saw him in the distance, at the chariot races and the games."

"The games? As with gladiators and lions? I thought you were a Christian, or are the Durvas folktales all wrong?"

"My father sometimes took me to the games to see what happens to Christians who get careless." "So the lions won?"

"Nearly always. The lions cost money. Christians and
hu-miliores
were free."

"You will find this a rather godless century after living in the pious Middle Ages."

"I like the principles that Christ taught, but I care nothing for the religions that sprang up in his wake. That sort of talk
would have got me burned at the stake in the fourteenth century, of course, so I displayed as much piety, as I needed to
blend in. To travel through time one has to adapt very quickly."

"And you certainly adapt quickly, Vitellan. If an adaptability imprint could be made from your mind we could lease it to
Microsoft to sell to the icehead market. You could be a rich man—but then you're already a rich man."

"Am I really?"

"Oh yes indeed."

Moscow South Orbital was a vast snowfield fed by underground maglev lines and surface freeways from the city and
other airports. As the runways were enormous maglev lines in themselves, no other aircraft could use them. Vitellan
gazed through the panoramic window of the lounge at the massive angular spearhead shapes that floated at about a
man's height above the snow. Sub-Orbital Maglev Spacecraft, or SOMS, the cyclopedia told him. They were held above
the ground by superconducting magnets in the runway. During takeoff, the magnets also accelerated the SOMS to
hypersonic speed by the end of the runway, where ramjets took over. They were braked by a reverse process when they
landed. A dragchute and lightweight skids were included for emergencies, but had not been used in twenty years of
SOMS operation.

"Boarding now," said Lucel, taking Vitellan by the arm.

The moving walkway took them along a transparent tube that reared up to the side of a SOMS. Vitellan had an idea of
the thing's size from his imprints, but not the experience of approaching something so large.

"Will it never stop growing?" he whispered.

"We're "going to America," Lucel explained curtly. "By this machine it's only an hour away,"
America. The man who had visited Hadrian's wall in 160 a.d., when it was a state-of-the-art military installation, began
scanning the cyclopedic subset of his imprints.

"By common usage, 'America' is a generic term for the USA," he said after a few moments.

"Sorry, you're right. Try scanning Houston, Texas."

They stepped off the walkway and were greeted by smiling flight attendants. Vitellan glimpsed faint brown streaks on
the carbonfiber-ceramic skin of the SOMS, then they were inside a vast, low auditorium of golden brown carpet, dark
green seats, and rows of blue overhead lockers. Brown, green, and blue were the flag colors of Ecosphere, the
Earth-Nation movement. It was one of several international power groups, and the youngest except for the Luministes.
Vitellan sat down carefully and drew the belt across himself with the caution of a beginner under instruction. Lucel
flicked on his tray screen and selected the view from a camera near the nose of the SOMS. Being in business class, they
sat isolated in a pair of seats. Other passengers filed briskly aboard. Most were in casual clothes, middle-class Russians
escaping the Moscow winter for resort ranches in the American Southwest.

"Anything I can get you?" The attendant spoke Russian with an American accent.

"We're fine, but my friend does not like flying," Lucel explained, and she threw the girl a flicker of a wink. "No fuss,
please."

"Oh, I'm sorry. We have a range of mini-imprints that can help."

"No, thank you. It would affect his cricket, and he has a corporate match scheduled."
When she had gone Vitellan turned to Lucel.

"An imprint really would have helped."

"Contact with an imprinter would also have relayed a few important IDs from your brain to the Russian Federal Airlines
database. Some things have to be done from experience, and this is one of them."

"Cricket," he said, going straight to his imprints. "Bat and ball game of English origins. Popular in countries of the
former British Empire and currently increasing in popularity in the United States—"
Lucel put a finger to her lips. "It's considered geek to vocalize your imprints."

"Really? That was not in my imprints."

A flight safety video played in the top right corner of all tray screens. The SOMS began to turn. Vitellan could see the
snowfield rotating before the nose camera, but it was so smooth that he felt no sense of motion. A melodious
announcement declared to the cabin, "Prepare for takeoff. Counting down . . . three, two, one." The sudden crush of
acceleration was alarming rather than uncomfortable. Lucel switched to the tail camera view a moment before the
ramjets cut in, but the airport was only visible for moments. The runway and countryside plunged out of the screen, and
were replaced by a white nothingness of cloud, then the mottled gray top of the cloud layer.
Imprints flung reassuring background to Vitellan: the hydrogen-fueled ramjet-rocket hybrid was the best and safest
transport technology in history. The tail camera now showed the clouds below through shimmering but smokeless
exhaust. There was a dull, rushing rumble and a slight vibration to hint at the power that they were riding, but otherwise
the background music from the screen unit was easily audible.

"Once you get over the strangeness this is not so daunting," he remarked, more to himself than to Lucel.
Lucel switched on a local standing-wave cloaker in her breast pocket. "We can talk in private now, and I can tell you that
the worst is yet to come."

The transition from ramjet to rocket configuration was no more than a slight lurch, followed by an increase in the
G-force pressing them into their seats. Vitellan's screen now showed breaks in the distant cloud, and mountains below
that. He became aware that the pressure forcing him back into the seat was lessening. "One minute to Zero-G," the
melodious, reassuring voice of the unseen captain announced to the cabin.